International Search Engine Marketing and Arbitrage (Porn video search engine)
Limited Competition in Secondary Markets
I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can’t appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.
In The Slums of Search, Gord Hotchkiss wrote:
At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn’t trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search.
If Google can’t attract the right advertisers that also means that the organic search results in that geographic market are likely easy to manipulate. In many underdeveloped markets around the world, PPC offers greater opportunity than SEO because their is virtually no competition, but as the markets mature and margins get squeezed, doing SEO and owning a brand becomes more profitable than PPC. Either way you approach it, if you can compete on Google.com you should be able to dominate foreign markets. The only issue is scale.
Estimating Market Scale
Google offers an ad preview tool to show you what ads look like in various markets, and you can take advantage of their traffic estimator tool to estimate the size of a market.
If you are in a market dominated by engines other than Google (like China and Russia) then of course you have to use tools other than Google to estimate the size of the market.
How to View US Google Search Results
If you are international and do not want to get redirected to your local version of Google you can view Google.com’s results by going to Google.us. While on Google.com you can append &gl=us to see the related US targeted ads. Another option to view international Google search results by using this Google global Firefox Extension or use Joost’s plugins that turn off personalization.
How Google Makes Lazy US Only Advertisers Buy Foreign Traffic
While in the Philippines I have noticed that some $20 keywords (in the US) have few advertisers here, and many of the ads are for garbitrage websites. For example, one page advertising on student loans went to a page with stolen content, and had a page title about mesothelioma. If an advertiser choses US only search distribution but opts into the content network they are probably paying for exposure on that page.
When I switched Google to only search local pages the number 1 ranked page for online degrees was an off topic forum thread. Limited competition means great opportunity for those who understand the local culture and are able to gain international recognition.
Death of the Book: Publishers Will Become Interactive Media Artists
Books Are Losing Relevancy
Google and Amazon are both pushing to sell ebooks directly aggressively. An article in the NYT mentions a new device Amazon will offer for reading ebooks, but I don’t think the problem with books and ebooks is that they need a better reader.
Google now allows you to embed book pasages directly in web pages, likeso
But that feature isn’t going help you get discovered or earn you many readers unless you already are William Shakespeare.
The big problem is that the web is quickly becoming more interactive and diverse and useful, making books irrelevant for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.
Personal Relevancy
The larger a book becomes, the less likely it is to be relevant to any individual, and the less value each word has. People who may disagree with some concepts in your book may agree with pieces that they would be willing to cite if they could only find it. But they will never cite your information unless they can find it.
No matter what people believe, in almost every case someone has already shared the same belief. Format it in small sharable chunks with good findability and people will cite it.
A while ago I wrote a post about making information easy to consume. Recently Thomas Crampton interviewed Cory Doctorow about how to build blog readership, and that 6 minute interview is far more useful than my article was. See for yourself:
Attention Deficit Disorder
Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time.
People may want to consume relevant bits. Cognitive dissidents. Summaries that let us dive deeper if we want to. Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.
Rarely is something that is fully polished, comprehensive, and dated what we need. More likely it is easier to learn by stepping into a process and learning one piece at a time, starting with your interests, then expanding as we run into additional problems. Even with blog posts, people justifiably complain about my writing blog posts in spurts, and using links that are not descriptive enough to merit a click-through.
Leveraging the Web
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Writers should use the web for what it is worth. Break books into pieces, read and write daily, cite sources, go back and polish the best pieces and package them, but try to keep each idea as sharp as possible.
Knowing how to create a useful information product is not enough to maximize profits. A big flaw with my ebook is that it has soooo much information in it, but it is hard to show the value of it because it is a single item. You can’t tell how much stuff was waded through to write it, that it is mentally and emotionally draining to revise, and it doesn’t help that most Internet marketing ebooks are lead generation devices or affiliate marketing tools. Someone could sell much less and look like they were selling more, just by using better packaging.
The Inevitable Death of No & Low Value Networks
Just like chunks of content are getting broken down into smaller bits, so will content creation companies. Choice and technology are disintermediating most of the gatekeepers. You and I don’t need publishers for distribution, and the fear associated with that is the real reason why the US DoJ recently whored itself out to telecom companies. Many people in positions of power abuse copyright and are afraid of open markets. From the Fake Steve blog:
[TV] was a wonderful system. For you [TV Networks] anyway. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middlemen, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain — the consumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed mountains of dog shit, and the producers of content who were at your mercy and had to negotiate with this tiny number of networks who operated, let’s be honest here, as a kind of cartel.
Artists Become Publishers
If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.
John Andrews recently made another brilliant post talking about how artists need to become publishers:
You artists out there generating content will have to learn to publish if you want to participate in the Internet economy. Maybe that s why Google spends so much trying to help the Internet advance because it helps Google disintermediate the middlemen. When will Google bring us fast quantities of ISP-free, wireless bandwidth?
One day there will be no more middlemen. And then, Google will squeeze you for more profits. After all, growth needs to come from somewhere, right? When all the middlemen are gone, what s left? You are. For every producer there are hundreds of consumers hungry for more. Will Google offer rewards for you to procreate? Of course it will. It has to. It s Google s destiny to manage the creative class.
Everyone is Selling
Bob Massa recently shot short videos of a thousand year old marketplace, showing locals in India trying to sell him a donkey
Contrary to popular belief, selling is not about tricking people into buying what they don’t want. Yes, there are liars and thieves but that is not selling. That is lying and stealing.
Selling is about getting people to trust you enough to tell you their needs or desires and you satisfying those needs or desires. It is not always easy but it s certainly not complicated.
The Key is to Not Look Like You are Selling
If markets keep getting more competitive and artists become publishers then I think publishers need to start becoming artists. Almost anything you want to consume has free samples available online. Some are copyright violations, others are free marketing, and some are both.
Here is Dane Cook on why it is so hard to win an argument against a woman:
Humor is one of the easiest ways to build links and recommendations.
You don’t need to leave your computer to go to a concert, so if you do go you are going for the energy and the experience.
Even purely online things can look much richer than plain text. Here is Dan Thies’s example of how to implement dynamic linking. Notice it includes graphics, and how those graphics enhance the value of his post. Want free research on how personalization and universal search change how we interact with search results? If people are giving away that kind of value for free how do you compete?
Becoming an Artist
I think publishers have to stop being publishers and start becoming artists, marketing their product as art, hitting the same touchpoints art hit.
When breaking news from a friend (or a friend of a friend) is freely available in real time and virtually everything is a commodity people buy
- the buying experience and sense of connection the buyer has with the artist, including any sense of community or empathy offered
- recommendations from friends or other trusted sources
- the story behind the product or service
- your experience and expertise
- the trust and goodwill you built up through sharing information, personal interaction, and the above points
Even when we are not buying we are still paying with attention. Familiarity and attention are early steps in sales. The WSJ wrote about how Disney kept a low-fi feel to Mari Digby’s YouTube videos. She mixes in a few of her own original songs with old classics that have been viewed MILLIONS of times prior to dropping her first album. It is much easier to launch if you start off with a large fanbase.
Why it Helps to View Marketing as an Art
People are lazy and selfish. Especially anonymous people. If you try to replicate the links of an older competitor using the same techniques, many of the webmasters who linked at them will ignore you, even if your content is better than the stuff they are already linking at.
In all honesty, profit margins come more from perception than reality. If you are going to stay profitable you have to see the wave coming in and stay out in front of it, especially because as marketing techniques get abused they stop working. I am doing things today that I know I would not be profitable in a few years if I didn’t go out of my way to lay the foundation to make them look and feel exceptionally legitimate today. The only differences between legitimacy and illegitimacy are trust, familiarity, and perception.
The Short Side of Web Publishing
This post is not to suggest that the web is a utopia that is better than all other sources of information, but more that it is cheaper, faster, easier, and provides something that is good enough to satisfy most demands for free.
The web has downsides to it, like promoting hyped up information pollution as a form of marketing. But the reality of it is that everyone is short on time. And few deeply understand the publishing dynamics of search, so when people get screwed by finding bad information on the web or make bad decisions because of ideas they discovered over the web they will likely blame themselves for it.
It seems politicians don’t like this Internet thing too much. A 23 year old Polish man is facing 3 years in prison for ranking his president #1 for penis.
and after that start ma…
Turn Your Ads Into Lies / Research on Shifting Public Policy
Call it Research & People Will Believe It
The Computers and Communications Industry Association published research on the value of fair use. The research is completely biased, to the point of being fraud:
Even by the woeful standards of the bespoke research industry, this study is a crock. It’s not just bad; it’s absurd. What the authors have done is to define the “fair-use economy” so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials.
Even Smart People Buy This Junk
Google is a leading sponsor of the research. They know it is a lie, but one that fattens their profit margins, so why not help spread this one and spend a few dollars sponsoring the next one?
Cory Doctorow, who is brilliant, is helping spread this idea because it was the first such publication and he is emotionally attached to the idea. If you are the first person to create a value system that reinforces others values they are going to cite you day and night.
Marketing Continues to Blur into a Game of Psychological Warfare
As marketing and content merge, and as people become more aware of marketing, there are going to be a lot more non-profit organizations sharing research built around pushing lies that helps for profit companies. Some lies are damaging, others are not. Both smart and ignorant people will cast votes without understanding what they are doing. The machines that count votes promote information pollution and are amoral. Those selling sugar water to diabetics also sell safety water. Every dollar counts. As marketing advances, expect more people to play on your emotions using an ever-increasing complex and diverse array of techniques.
Why Google Hand Editing Seems Random
Many people wonder why Google hand editing seems random or incomplete, and why some of the best channels get edited while worse stuff is left untouched. Here are some of the reasons Google does a poor job equitably policing the web:
- The web it too large to police and engineer time is expensive.
- Policing certain segments produces unwanted blowback. How often do large corporations or influential bloggers get policed? (It is rare, and when it happens, it is sold as a side effect of feature for users.)
- When issues become popular they get prioritized. Many times Google won’t react unless they feel they are forced to. Sometimes they will lie and say they care, and then do nothing. Back in April I highlighted the Netscape search results in Google. Matt Cutts thanked me, but guess what…those Netscape lolita preteen search result pages are STILL ranking in Google, along with a bunch of other search results.
- If they edit in an incomplete or random fashion they evoke fear
- It is easier to control people through fear than to create a perfect algorithm
- They have no need to hand edit the worst offenders. If they are competent programmers the algorithms should take care of those sites. They sometimes edit a leading sites in a field to send a signal. They may throw in a group of other sites if they need to create cover, but their goal is to send a message and alter behavior.
To appreciate how hard it is to police the web read Eli’s recent post on how to create an SEO empire. How can Google compete with that?
How Will Viral Advertising Change the Web?
The web has long been rich in social and viral marketing elements. Email this to a friend, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. So many services have popped up that now there is a Social Media Firefox Extension and Andy Hagans is planning his fake review optimization service.
Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die. Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.
As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices. If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.
There has always been a wall between editorial and advertising. Viral self select ads rip that down. Kevin Kelly recently posted about how he sees the new Google Gadget ads changing the face of advertising.
What happens when publishers can see what is hot right now and can create commercially oriented content targeting it in near real time? What happens when they are encouraged to track and test their results and can see the results of other ideas simply by the frequency they see it? Many current arbitrage opportunities are going to die, but others will thrive on this new opportunity.
The more third party platforms optimize revenue streams the more profitable niche attention based publishing will become. Generalist sites will be less profitable than highly specialized niche publishing. Results based distribution across large networks will force advertisers to give publishers a larger cut of revenue.The key is to scour through the ads and format them in a user friendly way to where they are looking at relevant content. You can’t beat relevancy algorithms without bias, brand, focus, and strong editorial.
Re: pie fishing rules (with pics)
i agree fully. cake rules, pie i…
Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool Blunder
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
3 Ways to Get Screwed by Social Media Marketing
Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.
The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait. 
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful
Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.
It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn’t pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.
Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.
It doesn’t matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer
Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don’t Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well
Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.
Linkbait can do a great job of helping you build high authority citations, but it still needs to be offset with directory links, community links, media links, and any other type of quality link you can get.
